Home Health Care Can be Complicated

When you have a loved one who is getting older, they may be getting more forgetful or having a harder time getting around. Your loved one may need Alzheimers disease treatment or other medications and doctors’ appointments. If you aren’t around all of the time, it may be more than you can take on as well. It may be time to get an aide home health care company to come out and help take care of your loved one. There are many advantages of home health care, and a major one is that the person gets to stay in their home long after they may have been able to without the advantage in home health care.

When you get these services, there are varying levels of help that patients need. All home care services should do an evaluation of your loved one and make sure they have a thorough health history for that person. Then, the aide will know better what they need to help your loved one with. Some elderly people just need memory help while others need a lot of nursing care to be able to stay in their homes. It’s always best to make sure the aides know which it is.

You initially thought that it was the health care tasks that were going to keep you from being able to keep your father at home. In the end, however, it became as much about the confusion than anything else. You would find your father, always one to have plenty of energy, rummaging through the various irrigation / urethral trays, securement devices, and other items that the home care givers kept tucked away in the cupboards. For some reason your father seemed to have a real knack for finding the irrigation / urethral trays. Unfortunately, although he could always find them he did not seem to understand what they were for. He seemed to think that the irrigation / urethral trays were something else from his garage or his work shop.
As you watched your father wave the irrigation / urethral trays about asking you what he was holding, you longed for the days when he would instead ask you to identify some of the real treasures from his garage:

• Dated back a decade or more than 50 years, your dad is in the habit of announcing his arrival to your house with a question about the identification of various items. He, of course, knows exactly what the item is, but uses the day?s treasure as a way to transition into a story from his or your childhood.
• Oxen rings that his great grandfather used for plowing his field.

• Yellow plastic fencing and warning cones.
• Old photographs are a popular item for your father. He loves to bring photos and tell the family stories that go along with them.
• Used, but still in pretty good shape, tools. Your father has so many tools he feels that it is your duty to bring your husband some of the extras.

• Kerosene iron, that was both rusty and dirty. So much so, in fact, that everytime your dad tippied the ancient and heavy iron is spilled another pile of fine dust out.
• Nuts, bolts, and specialty finishing nails that are noisily swirled inside any variety of metal tins with matching lids.
• Old cameras, wooden dominoes, salt and pepper shakers and many other collectibles.
• Washboards, old-fashioned clothes ringers and other items that were used in houses across the country before modern electric appliances.

• Winding keys, old watches other shiny things.
• Hats from the farm and hats from the house.
• Ancient and rusty broken tools.
• Thimbles, knitting needles, and crochet hooks from your grandmother’s house.

• Twine and other rope making machine parts are some of your father?s favorite keepsakes. He remembers learning to make lead ropes for the horses from his uncle.
• Hillarious hats that used to belong to his mom, your grandmother.
• Items that he truly does not know what they are bring on the most animated conversations.
• Saying that it is at least 100 years old, your father also brought in a seed bag from a broadcast seeder, just like the one that the sower on top of the Nebraska state capitol.

• Individually packaged stacks of fabric that he is certain were part of a project that she started when he was a young child.
• Sheet music from the music cabinet in his aunt?s house.

As random as these things may seem, the scariest part is that for every one thing your dad brings to your home he has another 100 random items back home. In hindsight, the fact that your dad was showing up every visit with some other treasure to give you may have been a cry for help. He has always been a collector of gadgets, but typically he kept his finds in one of his many garages or sheds, and if the size merits, his half a football size Quonset building. When his visits to your home, however, transitioned into a way for him to deposit some other fantastic find on your otherwise spotless kitchen island, however, you should have been paying attention.
He never really said so in so many words, but you finally took the hint and offered to help him start the difficult task of sorting through his decades of items that had been stored away for another day.
That sorting, however, seemed easier. Now that you are faced with the urinary catheters and the other urology supplies that the home nurses kept asking for, you would rather spend the whole day sorting through your father’s treasures instead.